Candidate Frank Howard Poised for Fight with Delaney

Frank Howard, a candidate for Congress in Maryland’s 6th District, is drawing stark contrasts between himself and incumbent Rep. John Delaney on the very issues that led to one of the biggest election surprises in the nation last year, when voters overwhelmingly chose Republican Larry Hogan over the Democratic establishment.

An article in the Frederick News-Post last summer shows just how out-of-touch John Delaney is. When addressing a group of small business people, Delaney could have offered solutions to address the nation’s distorted and expensive tax code. Instead, he lectured them, telling business owners that Maryland is not competitive, and advising them to take their jobs elsewhere.

“The businesses that only want to talk about taxes will move out anyhow,” Delaney told the Frederick newspaper.

Frank Howard, on the other hand, wants to keep and grow business and jobs in Maryland’s 6th District, and will advance on the federal level the work Larry Hogan is doing in Annapolis. His agenda for positive change on Capitol Hill starts with reforming the tax code.

Howard has a five-year plan to replace the current tax code with a simple, flatter and fairer system that lowers rates and unleashes the economy to grow at twice the rate it is now. At key intervals, combined with an evaluation of the effects of each phase on the federal budget, Howard’s plan would collapse brackets, implement a flat tax, and ultimately modernize the entire code with a consumption-based fair tax.

“Under this approach, we can measure the progress of dynamic growth through lower taxes and end the partisan bickering that has stymied any meaningful reform of the code since 1986,” said Howard. “This is both practical and bold and would let Congress do something big, which it has not done in a long time.”

After Howard released the latest IRS tax migration numbers this fall showing that Maryland lost taxpayers at an alarming rate under the final two-years of former Governor Martin O’Malley, The Washington Times made repeated efforts to get a comment from Delaney.

“Mr. Delaney’s office did not return multiple requests for comment,” according to The Washington Times.

It’s easy to see why Rep. Delaney avoids this kind of press coverage. Not only did Maryland lose more than $1.2 billion in taxable income for the years 2013 and 2014, but nearly half of the state’s total loss came from Montgomery County.

Meanwhile, Delaney is on a photo-op tour, promising grant funding for pet projects at fine art museums and college campuses. When the Howard campaign analyzed the media coverage in newspapers like the Cumberland Times-News, they discovered 13 articles this year alone where lazy, partisan “reporters” cut and pasted the Congressman’s press releases and passed them off as “news” to their readers.

“What is news is that our country will be $20 trillion in debt by November of next year,” according to Howard. “The federal government should not be determining spending on local priorities, adding more government, more bureaucracy, more cost-over-runs and more layers of complexity on local projects.”

As the owner of a business for 18 years, Howard understands that economic recovery would unleash the power of the entrepreneurial spirit. It would also end the Obama-Delaney era of stagnation and unnecessary government handouts.

Frank Howard and his wife Denise have been happily married for 30 years and reside in Montgomery County. More information about Frank and his views can be found on his campaign website at VoteFrankHoward.com. You can also find him on Facebook at Frank Howard, and follow him on twitter @FrankHoward4MD.

Ally McMahon’s company, Amethyst Strategies, has advised Frank Howard on some aspects of his campaign.